And I still don't understand why Lambert left Norwich for Villa. It seems to me Randy Lerner will still be the problem irrespective of who the manager is. Fan ownership of clubs seems to be miles down the agenda.

Jakesta:I don't get soccer fans. I ask an honest question about why is seems that a new champion is crowed almost weekly, and all I get is snark. Are yo u worried someone might invade your "club"? Soccer isn't on TV, and I'm not going to follow it online. Its not a bad sport to watch, but you all act like it's some secret that nobody else.can know about.

Sorry, but a lot of others have posed similar type questions not because they were genuinely interested, but instead to just derail the ongoing conversation to say that soccer sucks. Most of the guys here have heard a couple hundred variations of soccer's boring, too slow, sucks compared to every other sport, real football is better, they're all divers, players are pussies, game takes too long, worst sport ever, rinse and repeat ad nauseum.

I'm not sure exactly which different world champions you were talking about, but English teams are in multiple competitions.

StRalphTheLiar:That wasn't me parked next to you (I have no stickers), but I think I may have been behind you on the road the other day

I drive a black Chevy truck with a Spurs sticker and a Linux shark on the tailgate. I'm going to go ahead and say that if you see a vehicle that meets that description, feel free to flash your lights and flag it down. It's either me, or you're going to have an interesting tale to tell in the next fitba thread.

Well all in all a decent start to the footballing day. Arsenal squeaks through to the next round without a replay, and I just won the Premier League, Europa League, and FA Cup with Leyton Orient in Football Manager.

The Envoy:Stimied in a Rut: Morning all. Woke up about 30 minutes ago after going to bed around 5 central. Lots of drinking. That's all I have to add other than that United should be up about 3 or 4 right now.

Stimied in a Rut:The Envoy: Stimied in a Rut: Morning all. Woke up about 30 minutes ago after going to bed around 5 central. Lots of drinking. That's all I have to add other than that United should be up about 3 or 4 right now.

And now they are!

Yep, much better. Fulham look like they don't even want to be there.

Yeah, looks like they gave up in the tunnel. Not contesting anything, sluggish in midfield. A cynic might think they had decided to exit the FA cup and focus on staying in mid-table. I don't think that myself, but it would explain their utter lack of commitment.

Jakesta:I don't get soccer fans. I ask an honest question about why is seems that a new champion is crowed almost weekly, and all I get is snark. Are yo u worried someone might invade your "club"? Soccer isn't on TV, and I'm not going to follow it online. Its not a bad sport to watch, but you all act like it's some secret that nobody else.can know about.

There are a lot of competitions. Like, a lot of them. Every country has its own national league, a number of tiers below each with their own league or leagues, and then in addition, there are a number of one-off competitions called cup competitions- usually the national-level cups take the form of tossing some large set of teams in a playoff bracket that gets redrawn every round.

Then the top performers in those get to participate in continental-level competitions the following season, which run concurrently with the various domestic competitions.

And then you have the national teams, which have their own regional, continental and global competitions- some for the youth teams, some for the senior teams, some for the women. Typically, the other competitions get put temporarily on hold so that the players picked for the national teams can go play for their country, but not always.

Plus, some domestic leagues run a football-like schedule, going fall-to-spring, and others run a baseball-like schedule, going spring-to-fall.

The end result is that soccer always has a gazillion things going on at once at any given moment and never has anything that could remotely be called an offseason. Not even the experts can really keep track of more than a few of them at once, and often when a club qualifies for continental-level competition, they get scheduled to play clubs they've never heard of from the far side of the continent. If you don't put limits on yourself, it can get bewildering fast.